A legal battle between two neighbours in Auckland, New Zealand hit headlines this week, after a bitter fall-out over bee poo.
Peta McClure who owns a number of bee hives on an orchard is facing legal action from his neighboursJenny Price and her partner Pete Stinton. They are unhappy because their house sits underneath the bees’ flight path.
They wrote in a letter last year,
After receiving no response, Price and Stinton instructed a lawyer who argues that the bee poo "amounts to a private nuisance and needs to cease immediately”. They added that the situation was “unreasonable, upsetting, frustrating and expensive”.
The orchard houses up to 35 beehives, according to McClure. At the height of the season each hive houses up to 60,000 bees and in winter around 10,000. McClure says that she would be willing to reduce the number of bees on her property, but to get rid of them entirely would “devastate” her.
The beekeeper who attends to the bees told the Sunday Star Times “I haven’t programmed the bees so they deliberately fly to their house and drop a big load”.
Local police have been contacted about the dispute, but have advised both neighbours that they need to “resolve it between themselves”, which seems unlikely.
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Peta McClure who owns a number of bee hives on an orchard is facing legal action from his neighboursJenny Price and her partner Pete Stinton. They are unhappy because their house sits underneath the bees’ flight path.
They wrote in a letter last year,
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After receiving no response, Price and Stinton instructed a lawyer who argues that the bee poo "amounts to a private nuisance and needs to cease immediately”. They added that the situation was “unreasonable, upsetting, frustrating and expensive”.
The orchard houses up to 35 beehives, according to McClure. At the height of the season each hive houses up to 60,000 bees and in winter around 10,000. McClure says that she would be willing to reduce the number of bees on her property, but to get rid of them entirely would “devastate” her.
The beekeeper who attends to the bees told the Sunday Star Times “I haven’t programmed the bees so they deliberately fly to their house and drop a big load”.
Local police have been contacted about the dispute, but have advised both neighbours that they need to “resolve it between themselves”, which seems unlikely.